Posts with tag shard

New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW's newest players to the basics of a good start in the World of Warcraft. Send us a note to suggest a WoW Rookie topic, and be sure to visit the WoW Rookie Guide for links to all our tips, tricks and how-to's.

UPDATE: Most groups use the automatic Disenchant option available in the loot roll box as of Patch 3.3.

This week, we're going to help you understand a practice that varies wildly from group to group, server to server and even expansion to expansion. "In the past few months, I've run into a situation with people who are (or who I think are) new players who happen to be 80," reader Sarabande writes to WoW Rookie. "To them, the idea of DEing BoP items for shards is completely alien (and to at least one, he just rolled greed on everything 'just to see if he could get it')."

Should your group roll for unwanted or unneeded drops when an enchanter is on hand to disenchant them? What's accepted in one situation might be scorned in another. Because there's no single way to handle the situation, it's important for new players to be aware of the options. It's also important to understand the reasons why players feel so strongly one way or another about this issue. Because there's no single "correct" method, the savvy player respects the group consensus.

Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.

In the Burning Crusade, an Enchanter's job in a raid or dungeon was to disenchant the boss drops that no one wanted into Large Prismatic Shards, and the entire group would roll for them.

This was considered the standard, and was the fairest way to divide up the loot. Instead of rolling on the bind on pick-up items that were not wanted, in order to sell them to a vendor for profit or to help pay for the repair bill, they were turned into something more useful. Prismatics sold for more at auction than a vendor would pay, and the shards could be saved for when the characters needed something enchanted.

All of this changed in Wrath of the Lich King. Suddenly, many Enchanters were acting like anyone who expected to roll for shards were selfish and clueless, and it has since become the norm for the Enchanter to keep all of the shards.

This week, I'll be discussing the reasons behind the change, and reassessing just how fair the change really is.

Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.

Back in the early days of the Azerothian economy, enchanters performed enchants with their own mats. You didn't sell anything you didn't have all the mats for, with the exception of special items such as Righteous Orbs for exclusive, high-end enchants like Crusader. When you were out of mats, you closed up shop for the day. Players laughed in your face if you asked them to provide their own mats, and anything for sale on the Auction House was overpriced to the nth degree. Enchanters developed relationships with crafters in other professions to create items that disenchanted into useful components. Players who leveled enchanting purely to disenchant items and sell the resulting reagents were frowned upon and hid their identities behind banker alts and mules.

Today, it's a disenchanter's market. Disenchanting has become a profitable "gathering" profession in and of itself. Groups expect enchanters to "shard" items on the spot during instance runs so that members can choose a more valuable shard instead of an undesirable BoP drop. Disenchanting is a whole new "profession"! Read on for Insider Trader's look at disenchanting as a money-making venture in its own right.

Insider Trader is your weekly inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.

Need more bag space? It's a completely rhetorical question for most WoW players. Blizzard's tight rein on player bag space is a perfect example of what I only somewhat jokingly refer to as WoW's "relentless tuning." And nobody feels the pinch quite so strongly as professions addicts -- crafters whose bags are full of little bits of this and that for making, well, even more of this and that.

Specialty bags to the rescue! Crafters have access to a whole host of beefier bags designed especially for holding crafting materials. These player-made bags do have some drawbacks. You can only carry one at a time on your person, and since they only hold profession-related items, they do cut down on the space you have for general inventory. You'll undoubtedly catch yourself snarling at the banker when tussling with the specifics of what items will and won't go into these bags -- but for all their prissy limitations, you'll come across some sweet surprises, too.

No discussion of specialty bags would be complete without a mention of player-made ammo bags and soul shard bags for warlocks, too. We'll include details on those containers at the end of this article.

Recently, I wrote a post on Rogues having trade windows opened up on them without so much as a word. As I suspected, many other Rogues out there indeed have the same problem. Of course, many had their own ways of dealing with it like picking the box, but not hitting trade until there was a tip in the window. Another idea was just keeping all trades off in their options so that people couldn't open up trades with them in the first place. All of these are things that I've tried from time to time with varying levels of success.

What I didn't expect, however, was the sheer amount of people who jumped in and brought up the similar plights that Mages and Warlocks face on a daily basis. As I've got a L59 Warlock and a L61 Mage, trust me when I say that I completetly understand and appreciate what you all go through with the requests you get. I'm not even able to portal others to Shattrath yet on my Mage, but anytime I'm playing her, I almost immediately get asked to open a portal there for someone anyway. Now, nobody has opened a trade window on me without asking and grunted out "food/water" as yet, but I've definitely gotten the tells demanding that I make food or water for them, as opposed to asking nicely.